No, you don't. The coal plant in another Alliant Energy area has been around since roughly 1900? or so. It's been updated several times. Never was there a need to rebuild from scratch any coal plant. (This is Madison Wi btw.) Now we stopped using coal there in 2011, (all gas now). But the point is, all the renovations are much cheaper than building a nuclear plant. Utilities around here, (the midwest), are run by old, stodgy, conservative guys who are generally not prone to rash action. There are very few executives around here who are going to build entirely new plants because the machinery in the old one has reached its end of service life. They are going to replace the machinery, at a fraction of the cost. I don't think executives in other parts of the nation are all that different in this regard. Now all that said, even if they did completely tear down and rebuild their plants, which they wouldn't, but even if they did, it would still be cheaper than building a nuclear plant.
So the coal plants are fine. And as I mentioned elsewhere, whatever you use to fill gaps will be a transitional technology. Wind turbines will become more efficient. (Work at lower windspeeds.) Pumped hydro storage will be built in new and innovative ways. What will fill the gaps in 2069 will bear little resemblance to what is filling the gaps in 2019. Because the new methods will likely be not only more clean, but much cheaper to boot.
And incidentally,
>You can't say that electricity from renewables is cheap without accounting for the cost of that standby capacity renewables require...
the 2 cents per kWh people see on their bill does factor in every source in the dispatch stack.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Running existing coal and nuclear generation appears to be cheap (2nd chart), but new generation appears to be much more expensive (1st chart). The cost of Solar + Storage is low and dropping, and already beats the cost of new nuclear plants (4th chart).
BTW, I grew up on the east side of Madison, Cheers.
Up until now, baseload has been a convenient way to do that matching because baseload was usually the cheapest source of power.
Once baseload is no longer the cheapest source, it's time to re-evaluate that model. Also, when we have a global communication grid and lots of flexibility in our load schedule, it's also fine to re-evaluate how we are doing pricing for electricity.
That time is now. Utilities are highly regulated, and both utility and regulator are slow to adapt to the quickly changing technology that they're now confronting, after nearly a century of glacial technology change. But they will adapt. As we must not only change our economic mode but also become carbon neutral.
Those with huge capital investments may resist, but as you say, we can repurpose that old coal plant and reuse its connections to the grid, which are valuable and expensive to recreate. In Moss Landing, California, gas turbines are getting replaced by over a GWh of lithium ion battery. The change will happen as soon as utilities start bringing recent pricing into their planning process.
Not really the case. Renewable output does not fluctuate fast enough to require the fast response of batteries.
Fast responding storage, in the case of the UK pumped hydro, is usually needed due to thermal plants tripping and causing the grid frequency to suddenly nosedive.
Since when was natural gas ever good for base load? It's almost always used peak load because it spins up quickly.